Relative to the rest of the Middle East, with Yemen and Syria in chaos and the Islamic State in its death throes, Israel seems almost calm. It is the only thriving democracy in the region, its GDP growth is pushing 3% and it is one of the United States’ strongest allies.
But a pair of illiberal actions came out earlier this month to challenge the notion that Israel is a full democracy. The first was the recommendation of indictment of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who, alleges the FBI’s Israeli counterpart, accepted gifts from wealthy friends and asked a major newspaper to suppress negative news and plump up positive coverage about him. The police findings might lead to Netanyahu’s impeachment. The premier has dismissed the findings as — wait for it — fake news.
The recommendation of indictment of Netanyahu can be taken one of two ways. On the one hand, Netanyahu is facing his second round of potential indictments (the first, at the end of last year, involved mass bribery in the purchase of several submarines sold by German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp). In the first case, the attorney general did not press charges; he has not moved to do so in this case either. The lack of action can be construed as proof that the state is owned by Netanyahu. Still, the fact that wrongdoing was alleged is a plus. In many countries, powerful people are widely known to be corrupt, yet nothing is done to investigate their misbehavior.
The second event was the decision by the Israeli government to remove 38,000 refugees from the African countries of Eritrea and Sudan by offering them a choice: take $3,500 and get out of the country or spend time in jail until you decide to leave. The targeted nationals are notoriously volatile (and, many Israel critics point out, majority-Muslim), so the decision is fitting with the right-wing ideology of Netanyahu’s Likud party. It also appears to be a response to the Donald Trump administration’s continued attempts to keep out immigrants from several Muslim countries, as well as its insistence on letting other nations make their own decisions instead of advocating human rights abroad.
If this situation seems ironic, that’s because it is. Americans are used to hearing that the U.S. is “a nation founded by immigrants;” Israel is a nation literally founded by refugees. After World War II, European Jews felt unsafe in the wake of Germany’s attempted ethnic cleansing, so the Allied Powers helped them start a state on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, the site of the original Israeli people. People from all over the world go to live in Israel because it has historically been so open to foreigners. For a country inhabited by Holocaust refugees and their children to close its doors to refugees is more than a humorous twist; it is counterproductive and undermines Israel’s very legitimacy.
The deportations highlight the damage the Netanyahu administration has done to Israel’s reputation. They also demonstrate the consequences of a weak foreign policy direction on human rights from the United States. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid as a proportion of GDP and the third most as a raw number; it has a lot to lose. Yet the Trump administration has hardly acknowledged Israel’s decision to throw tens of thousands out of the country. But then, Trump himself has expressed interest in throwing out tens of millions of economic migrants from his own country.
Israel is proof that democracy works in the most volatile region in the world. But the country’s drift away from liberalism is dangerous and harms its reputation. Netanyahu must stop removing his countrymen and work to integrate them into Israeli society.
